IRS probe vindicates Obama
听
Darrell Issa is having a mighty tough time these days.
The seven term U.S. Rep. from San Diego had been using his position as the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to create salacious headlines and a number of high-profile investigations. His favorite target? President Obama.
Issa had been the darling of TV talk-shows while he claimed his investigation into the IRS turned up proof it was the willing handmaiden of the Obama administration — working overtime to bring his political enemies to their knees.
Issa was so sure he’d snagged Obama in some sophisticated plot to get even with his detractors, that he sent some of his fellow Republicans into a tizzy with hopes that the Internal Revenue Service would be thrown on the ash heap of history and that history would, someday, show that Obama was more Nixonian than Nixon. The noted conservative, George Will, gleefully compared the alleged scandal to Watergate.
Some ultra-conservatives could smell a rat (as only they could) by chaining Obamacare to the very IRS agents who were hard at work trying to make the lives of Tea Party members miserable. (As if their lives weren’t already miserable. Remember the 2012 elections?)
The whole thing started with the release of an investigative report by the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration, which indicated that many Tea Party groups had filed for, but were given extra-scrutiny when they applied for, tax-exempt status.
Issa, who saw his opening, leaped into action. He scheduled hearings, subpoenaed documents and set-up interviews, with one goal in mind — get Obama. Mind you, this is the same Darrell Issa who’d proclaimed, in 2010, that he wanted the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to hold “seven hearings a week times 40 weeks.”
So sure was Issa that he’d found a chink in Obama’s armor that even after the White House denied it hadn’t been behind any effort to direct the IRS to do anything, Issa kept running to the nearest TV cameras.
On June 2, Issa appeared on CNN’s State of the Union, and he told the host Candy Crowley that it was “a problem that was coordinated in all likelihood right out of Washington headquarters — and we’re getting to proving it.”
He even called White House Press Secretary Jay Carney a “paid liar,” because he backed his boss by saying that the enhanced Tea Party scrutiny was the result of a local IRS worker in Cincinnati — not anybody in Washington “Liar” is a mighty strong word, don’tcha think.
At that point, it seemed all Issa needed was a couple of capes and a mask, and he’d become Superman, Batman and The Lone Ranger all wrapped into one. But stop the presses.
The ranking Democrat on that same congressional committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, was incensed by Issa’s comments. He called them “reckless.”
Cummings later announced that if Issa wouldn’t release the full transcripts of one of the key interviews the committee had conducted, one that would shed essential light on the White House’s lack of involvement in any IRS targeting, then he would.
Days passed, and then Cummings made good on his promise.
The transcripts revealed that it was really a conservative Republican who was a manager in the IRS office in Cincinnati who’d spearheaded the effort to take long looks at the increased number of groups calling themselves “Tea Party,” — not some wild-eyed Democratic associate of the Obama administration.
That left Issa with one alternative. He complained that it was Cummings who was gumming up the works and interfering with his investigative work.
By then, it was clear that Issa had become the King of the Witch Hunts. But there was even more.
According to a report released by the Associated Press, not only were Tea Party groups flagged when they applied for tax exempt status, so were groups labeled “Progressive,” “Occupy” and “Israel” — hardly candidates for Obama’s so-called “enemies list.”
Although, if Obama has one of those, I’d be willing to wager Darrell Issa’s name might be on it.
Uniontown native Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net
—